Michael Cohen, Ukraine, Deutsche Bank: Your Friday Briefing

Good morning. Michael Cohen’s surprise revelation, Ukraine’s appeal to NATO and a five-week church service (and counting).

Here’s the latest:

Image

CreditJefferson Siegel for The New York Times

• Trump’s former lawyer pleads guilty.

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s onetime fixer and personal lawyer, admitted to lying to Congress about Mr. Trump’s unrealized plans for a Trump-branded skyscraper in Moscow, pursued at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign. Above, Mr. Cohen leaving court in Manhattan after making his guilty plea.

Mr. Cohen said he had falsely minimized the business venture to protect Mr. Trump. The deal raises the question of whether Mr. Trump’s conciliatory stance on Russia during the campaign was partly motivated by his business interests.

Shortly after Mr. Cohen’s plea, Mr. Trump, citing Russia’s detention of captured Ukrainian soldiers, canceled a planned get-together with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. They had been scheduled to meet this week in Argentina, where leaders from the Group of 20 are meeting.

Above, a Ukrainian soldier on the Azov Sea in Mariupol, Ukraine, a port city that the Ukrainian government claimed Thursday had been blockaded by a Russian cargo stoppage in the narrow Kerch Strait, the site of the attack.

“Putin wants the old Russian Empire back,” Mr. Poroshenko said in an interview with a German newspaper. “Crimea, eastern Ukraine, he wants the whole country.”

But Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and moving NATO ships into disputed waters would risk catastrophic war with Russia. NATO commanders have said such action is unlikely.

The 400 news websites, newspapers, television channels and radio stations were donated to the holding company by more than a dozen media owners in coordinated announcements.

If the deal is approved by regulators — led by an official appointed by Mr. Orban — it would create an arrangement that rights observers say will be unique within the European Union: a member nation with most of its leading media outlets under state control.

_____

Image

CreditAxel Wicke

• A nonstop church service.

Bethel Church in The Hague, above, is carrying out a kind of filibuster to protect an Armenian family that, after living for nine years in the Netherlands and three times being granted asylum in earlier rulings, was denied asylum.

For five weeks and counting, the church has been holding a marathon service, shielding the family with a Dutch law that generally prevents the authorities from conducting operations in a place where a religious service is being held.

The service has captured national attention, creating a snowball effect that has made the logistics easier: Hundreds of pastors from around the country, and even some from other nations, have volunteered to preach during the service.

The Tamrazyan family — two parents and their three children, ages 21, 19 and 14 — is staying in an apartment in the church. The family says it will be endangered in Armenia because of political activism by the father.

_____

Image

CreditThe New York Times

•A business with no end.

A student told our writer that his parents in California were receiving mysterious packages at their house. Each was addressed to “Returns Department, Valley Fountain LLC.”

That led the writer on a journey through bizarre Amazon storefronts selling everything from hemorrhoid creams to a book on industrial electricity. All the LLCs had something in common: Their registered agent was the same man.

When our writer kept digging, she found more connections, to Newsweek, a department store in New York and a church. And the story kept getting stranger.

Business

Image

CreditMichael Probst/Associated Press

• Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt, pictured above, were raided as part of a money-laundering investigation involving more than $350 million, prosecutors said. The company said the investigation was related to the Panama Papers.

• Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, asked the company’s communications staff to research George Soros’s financial interests in the wake of his high-profile attacks on tech companies, according to three people with knowledge of her request.

• A trove of text messages details a plan by Leslie Moonves, the former chief executive of CBS and one of Hollywood’s most powerful people, and by a faded Hollywood manager to bury a sexual assault allegation. Instead, the scheme helped sink Mr. Moonves, and may cost him a $120 million severance package.

•Paul Polman, the chief executive of the British-Dutch consumer goods maker Unilever and a prominent voice in favor of changes to the corporate status quo, said he was stepping down.

In the News

Image

CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times

• In war-destroyed Yemen, conditions have become so desperate that they compel the difficult question of whether a journalist should put down his notebook and help. Above, Ahmed Ibrahim al Junaid, an infant experiencing malnutrition and dehydration last month at a Unicef-run mobile clinic in Aslam, Yemen. [The New York Times]

• As Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia arrived in Buenos Aires for the Group of 20 meeting, an Argentine judge took the first steps in a legal inquiry into criminal charges of human rights violations in the Yemen war. The authorities said there was no possibility that charges would be filed before the end of the two-day summit meeting. [The New York Times]

• The Chinese authorities suspended the work of He Jiankui, the scientist who claimed to have created the world’s first genetically edited babies, calling his conduct “unacceptable.” [The New York Times]

• Salome Zurabishvili, a French-born former foreign minister of Georgia, will be its first female president after winning a runoff vote that her opponent called rigged. [The Associated Press]

• Cambridge Analytica, the British voter-polling firm, used fashion tastes to identify right-wing voters, according to a founder turned whistle-blower. [The New York Times]

• In memoriam: Randolph L. Braham, an American scholar of the Holocaust in Hungary who denounced what he called an official whitewash of its collusion in it, has died at 95.

Noteworthy

Image

CreditColin O'Brady

• Louis Rudd, a captain in the British Army, and Colin O’Brady, an American adventure athlete, are in the midst of a race across Antarctica, where their daily tasks range from the mundane to the death defying. Above, a photo by Mr. O’Brady.

• The $64,000 that Anna Burns received when she won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for “Milkman,” her novel set at the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, may help her obtain treatment for severe nerve pain. “If it’s successful, I’ll be able to write again,” she told us in an interview.

Back Story

Details of the last minutes of a doomed Lion Air flight emerged this week thanks to data from the Boeing jet’s black boxes.

Planes did not always have these data recorders. During the first half of aviation’s history, crashes went mostly unsolved.

Enter David Warren, an Australian whose father was killed in an air crash. In the mid-1950s, after helping investigate a plane wreck, he came up with a way to capture information from any plane’s last minutes.